It’s often asked, why did the Scientific Revolution occur only in Europe and not China? By which I shall here mean what I explain in my book The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire as the normalization of effective scientific methods across (at least literate) society. As I document there, the Roman Empire at its peak was on the verge of this (in a way China never was), falling short only in two steps that weren’t fully realized until the course of the 17th century: a clear and consistent demarcation among scientific researchers between reliable and unreliable methods; and the more-or-less universal acceptance of this fact among the literate, intellectual, and political elite. The Romans had all the methods usually credited to the Scientific Revolution (whereas China did not). They just used them alongside more speculative philosophical methods as well, producing more of a mixed bag, slowing the pace and scale of progress.

To be clear, a terminological demarcation between science and philosophy did not occur during the Scientific Revolution (that wouldn’t been realized until the 20th century, a point I document and discuss in Is Philosophy Stupid?). But the demarcation between methods, recognizing what we “now” call philosophy as subordinate and less authoritative, was what the 17th century established in Europe (and even that did not happen overnight: see my article Galileo’s Goofs). Likewise, though there was a lot of respect and enthusiasm for science among the Roman elite, they had not yet made this a normative aspect of their culture, in the way Newton’s Principia finally achieved. For example, while there were many calls to create something like the Imperial Society of Rome for Improving Natural Knowledge, such an idea hadn’t hit high enough on any emperor’s radar before the effective collapse of Roman civilization began in the 3rd century.

So I think we can more or less explain why the Scientific Revolution didn’t happen in ancient Rome. Various attempts at explaining this were explored in H. Floris Cohen’s magisterial The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (University of Chicago, 1991). And I summarize much of that, and where I think the evidence actually leads to on the question and why, in Scientist. It was Cohen’s survey, in fact, that largely inspired my entire Columbia University dissertation, which resulted in two books, The Scientist and Science Education in the Early Roman Empire. The short of it is, at its peak in the first and second centuries of our era, the Roman Empire had achieved the same level of intellectual, industrial, and economic accomplishment as would later characterize 16th century Europe (see Ancient Industrial Machinery & Modern Christian Mythology and Imperial Roman Economics as an Example of an Overthrown Consensus). And all the same trends toward the ideas of the Scientific Revolution can be found in second century scientific writings of the Roman era (as I also document in Scientist).

There isn’t really any empirical argument to be made that Rome wouldn’t have continued on the same course to the same conclusion, had it not catastrophically declined in the very next century—which was dominated by a fifty-year-long civil war ending in the total collapse of its fiduciary economy, the equivalent of the Great Depression, to which the response was doubling up on fascism and mysticism, and the corresponding abandonment of the intellectual values necessary to drive any scientific progress further, a pattern Christianity simply ran with and accelerated once it took the reigns. It was all down hill from there. This essentially put the West in a holding pattern for a thousand years. Half of which was an era of ruin; and the other a long, slow slog back up the ladder to where things had once been—culminating in what’s now called the Renaissance for a reason: it marked the rebirth of the pagan ideas and values that had once driven steady scientific and industrial and philosophical progress. And really, only one thing differed: Europe was on its wax, not its wane at just that time; it thus continually improved economically and industrially (and thus, also intellectually) after that point.

But what explains China’s failure to beat us to it? After all, we really hosed this. With the rise of Christendom, we effectively fumbled the whole ball for a thousand years. Plenty of time for China to have caught up. Also in contention of course was the Islamic world, which for a brief moment (between about 800 and 1100 A.D.) flirted with its own Renaissance, also (like the later Renaissance in Christendom) built on the shoulders of Greco-Roman science, which could have evolved into a bona fide Scientific Revolution—and indeed, it could have done so centuries before the West caught up. There really were no other civilizations that ever came anywhere near this development. We know what happened to Islam. Fundamentalism took over and essentially fucked the entire Islamic world for a thousand years, in a manner very similar to what Christendom did to the West, only Christianity’s fucking of society started centuries earlier, and thus was due to clock-out before Islam’s own similar mistake did. Thus, Islam essentially gave up the lead, and let the West pass it in the race to the finish line.

China briefly flirted with similar behavior, but much earlier—vicious purges of books and intellectuals in the 3rd century B.C. for example, and lesser suppressions of intellectualism continued to recur under almost every dynasty thereafter (most notoriously under the early-modern Qing dynasty, right when Europe’s Scientific Revolution was under way, a classic case of really bad timing). But the worst of this was that earlier purge, and China reached its peak in following centuries, such as during the Han dynasty, in fact almost exactly tracking in timeline the Roman Empire on the other side of the planet. And China continued achieving technological advances ever-after; industrially, it remained comparable to Rome at its height, for most of its existence. But it simply stagnated there. Thus it was unprepared when the Western Industrial empires arrived, too far behind to ever really catch up to them on its own. But why did China never get anywhere in this race, despite having literally thousands of years to figure it out?

The best succinct answer to this question is laid out by Alan Cromer in Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science. His overall point: real science requires developing and deploying methods contrary to all natural human intuition (a point I too have made, e.g. in Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning and Why Plantinga’s Tiger Is Pseudoscience); it therefore cannot be expected even to commonly arise, much less then dominate society. Though that isn’t really an explanation, so much as simply a description, of the problem. But Cromer outlines some causal factors, including China’s persistent bent toward isolationism and conservatism after the Han era, resulting in an active disinterest in intellectual progress beyond certain acceptable parameters. But one can still ask why that was the case. And so on. To answer questions like that, one has to go deeper. For the most solid scholarly background, the place to start would be the latest summary of what happened differently in Greece and China by the most renowned and prolific expert on the comparative history of science in China and Greece, G.E.R. Lloyd, whose book Expanding Horizons in the History of Science: The Comparative Approach takes the big picture view and cites via notes and bibliography all the leading or most current works in the subject.

Lloyd has devoted his entire career to the subject and has written numerous excellent books on various aspects of the question I am asking today, so that latest summary won’t even get you the whole story; you may need to explore the particulars. See Amazon’s Reverse Chronological List of his books; but for important examples, see The Ambitions of Curiosity, which also uses Mesopotamia as an analog—an advanced civilization that for many thousands of years never even got near a Scientific Revolution, as one could also observe of Egypt—or Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections, which focuses on the negatives and positives of their differing cultural milieus. I have been studying this same subject since my undergraduate days at Berkeley, working under David Keightley, as one of his protegés at the time, taking his courses on ancient China and the cross-cultural study of death customs (which compared ancient China, Greece, Israel, and Sumer). He helped me on numerous personal projects stemming from all the questions I had of an expert in ancient China: Did ancient China have atheists? Science? A belief in hell? Knowledge of the Roman Empire? What was the principal conflict between Taoism and Confucianism? And beyond. My Berkeley honors thesis, for example, was a comparative study of ancient Chinese, Greek, and Roman conceptions of the hero and the soul, and the possible interactive connections between those two concepts, which Keightley had a significant hand in supervising. That’s reproduced now in my book Hitler Homer Bible Christ.

Throughout its history, what passed for science in China was really either just craft knowledge (like medicine and engineering and astronomy throughout the world before the Greco-Roman systematizations, formalizations, and improvements) or philosophy (lacking any formalized empirical method, indeed lacking even much in the way of formalized logic or mathematics, e.g. China never developed any system of syllogistic deduction: see Logic and Language in Early Chinese Philosophy and Logic in China; or axiomatic mathematical systems, they did not even light upon the notion of formal proofs, and only worked up practical tools on a trial-and-error basis: see Chinese Mathematics and Joseph Dauben’s comparison of developments in Chinese and Greek geometry). As Chad Hansen once put it for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Technically, classical China had semantic theory but no logic.” They were really only interested in working out how to analyze what people say, and that mostly for ethical and political debate; they were not much interested in systematically exploring why various systems of analysis work or don’t work, nor got around to using such knowledge much for resolving debates about how the natural world works and why. And to make matters worse, even what they had in the way of this kind of philosophy suffered under cyclical bouts of anti-intellectualism all across Chinese history.

In a sense, you could say China was always so obsessed with the practical that it all too often never saw enough value in the theoretical. Though theory abounded, it was mostly speculative rather than empirical; the Chinese never made the proper connection between theory and practice, and thus never discovered (or never convinced a wide enough segment of the elite to accept) that, when deployed correctly, theoretical achievement is a powerful engine of practical advances. China also never fostered a general culture in which debate (rather than obedience) regarding the facts of reality was seen as acceptable or valuable—at least after the Han Dynasty, or for any period of time of sufficient length to jump-start an intellectual revolution such as consumed ancient Greece and Rome. One can even see this in the rare examples of extant discussions of the Roman Empire during even the Han dynasty, the most amenable to intellectual progress of any to follow. Notably, the Chinese always knew more about the Romans than vice versa, and we have extant descriptions of official reports from emissaries that China sent to gather intel on their distant rival (see Rome and China by Walter Scheidel). Yet conspicuously absent from these is any discussion of logic, mathematics, science, or even philosophy. They were mainly concerned with the oddities of Roman state management and administration, and to some smaller extent technology, economics, and industry. But again, always looking to the superficial and the practical.

Importantly, the Chinese were always, in result, very empirical. Yet they never made the crucial connection between the empirical and the theoretical, and as a consequence, their advancement was always stalled, limited to only what you can observe and do directly. As Dauben puts it:

Instead of pursuing abstract and logical concerns, Chinese mathematics, like Chinese science, developed a rich tradition of empirical observation. However, theirs was not a theoretical orientation that sought to leave the world of physical experience and practical applications behind in order to construct and test purely theoretical models or explanatory frameworks.

And it turns out, this is extremely limiting. If you are only theoretical and unempirical, you get flights of fancy, mythology, no real progress in understanding reality (think, Homeric Greece, Ancient Isreal). If you are empirical but untheoretical, you can accomplish a lot of practical craft knowledge, but you can’t really get at anything deeper. Science requires the productive unification of both, building on a method of formulating hypotheses (models; causal and structural theories), then developing reliable ways to test them for explanatory accuracy. This never happened in China. They had verificationist empiricism (hence, craft knowledge); but not falsificationist empiricism (hence, science). China thus never even came close to a Scientific Revolution the way ancient Rome did—and if ancient Rome hadn’t, neither would Western Europe have. For without those Greco-Roman foundations having been there to recover, there would have been no Renaissance, and thus no subsequent firming up of the ideas it carried.

This is evident in results, as well as methods. As for methods, we can discern the difference by the complete absence from Chinese history of the most reliable Greco-Roman scientific methodologies. As for results, the Chinese never figured out that the Earth was a sphere or that it orbited the sun, nor ever developed anything we would recognize as mathematical laws of planetary motion (like Ptolemy’s law of Equal Angles in Equal Times that Kepler later built into Equal Areas in Equal Times, or his theory of eccentricities that approximated elliptical motion). There were a few instances of the purely speculative suggestion that the Earth might be a sphere, but never on any empirical basis—because empirically demonstrating that requires theoretical foundation. For example, we see Han Dynasty arguments from analogy that the Earth “has” to be the same shape as the heavens, and the heavens “looks” round. But this is not what we call scientific thinking. And such ideas never became popular anyway. In biology, likewise. For example, the Chinese never figured out what the renal system does or how it works, as Galen did, nor ever localized brain function, as Herophilus did. They never even figured out that the brain produces all human thought, continuing instead to attribute that to the heart and other organs, until modern Western science arrived to correct them—a development still opposed by many Chinese traditionalists.

In the end, if we want to answer the question, “Why did the Chinese not achieve a Scientific Revolution?” we may have to accept the fact that the answer is, “Because, pretty much, no one did.” Mesopotamia. Mesoamerica. Egypt. India. Persia. Not a one of them even came as close as ancient Rome did—and Rome only did, because it eagerly embraced and built on the achievements of the Greeks. So it really comes down to, “Why did the Greeks come up with all this?” Formalization of logic and mathematics (deductive syllogisms, axiomatic proofs, theoretical rather than merely practical understanding, answering the question of every physical and mathematical peculiarity, not just “how,” but “why,” and how can we really know that); likewise a systematized, hypothetico-empirical science that actually becomes more accurate over time, as its method allows it to abandon bad ideas and start elevating sound ones, rather than just continuing to accumulate and revere speculation and fancy (as consumes much of traditional Chinese medicine and astronomy and physics): these are all Greek achievements, which the subsequent political, economic, and industrial success of the Roman Empire then allowed to accumulate further, and probably would have made it to what we mean by the Scientific Revolution by the 4th or 5th century, had its fortunes grown rather than fallen (everything instead going to shit in the 3rd century and not recovering, intellectually, for well over a thousand years). China was thus no different than any other advanced civilization—it was actually a typical human society—on this specific intellectual metric. Typical human societies simply never develop what we mean by science; they only achieve craft knowledge. We have administrative documents from Mesopotamia that date back almost to 3000 B.C., which means it went well over four thousand years without ever hitting on the innovations the Greeks did. Should we be surprised then that neither did China in merely three thousand years time?

Perhaps the surprising thing is that China’s intellectual sophistication between the Qin Dynasty (circa 3rd century B.C.) through the Qing (ending circa 19th century A.D.) was extraordinarily impressive, arguably more so than any other great civilization outside the West can claim. Its technological and engineering achievements, unmatched; as likewise its philosophy and mathematics and semantics (the closest approximation it had to logic). So one wonders how it could achieve all that and still get no farther than Sumer or Egypt in respect to “formal” science, logic, and mathematics. The answer is probably the same. We are simply falsely equating all that with science. When we speak of formal science, logic, and mathematics, we are actually referring to something extremely bizarre in the human ethnographic record, a counter-intuitive paradigm shift in how we accumulate the equivalent of “philosophical” and “craft” knowledge. Understood as such, it is not surprising that China didn’t develop it. Because “it” here means something fundamentally different from what China did do, which was merely excel above all at what all civilizations do, which is merely accumulate philosophical and craft knowledge that nevertheless remains scattered within a sea of errors, fantasies, and bad ideas all given the same weight. That only happens when you have no conception of how to tell the difference between those two things. And so really, the “secret sauce” is simply the remarkable, indeed clearly extraordinarily rare, discovery of how to tell the difference.

The Roman Empire got that far, but only because it had the virtue of enthusiastically adopting whatever good ideas it gleaned from conquered cultures—from the spoked wheel of the Celts to the blown glass of the Syrians, to the entire intellectual apparatus of the Greeks. China had no Greeks to learn from and build on. So we get back down to that one question, which is not, “Why not China?” but rather, “Why Greece?” To be fair, contrary to those who claim historians cannot answer counterfactuals, every positive historical causal theory entails a corresponding counterfactual. You cannot claim to know what caused the Scientific Revolution (or World War II, or the American Revolution, or anything whatever) without claiming to know what wouldn’t have caused it. Because the only way to claim to know what caused an outcome, is to know what causes, if we removed them, would not have had that outcome. That is in fact what it means to say those “are the causes.” If, after all, removing them made no difference to the outcome, clearly they did not cause that outcome. So we certainly can answer questions like, “Why did the Chinese not achieve the Scientific Revolution?” All we have to do is answer the question, “What did cause the Scientific Revolution?” Because if we really have the answer to that question, then by definition we will know the answer to the other: because if those causes are the causes, they necessarily must be observed as absent in China. For if they aren’t, then clearly we have failed to identify the actual causes.

I use this same reasoning in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire to answer the corresponding questions of why the Romans did not experience what we today mean by the Scientific Revolution, or the Industrial Revolution (which are not the same thing; on both, see my articles linked above). The short answer is, they almost did. The only thing we can confidently trace as having stopped them, was their collapse right before the payoff. But China never even became a contender. Which must be because of the lack in China of whatever it was that led the Greeks to so uniquely light upon the fundamental tools of formal, systemitized logic, mathematics, and science that actually make the difference between merely accumulating practical craft knowledge, and actually being able to tell the difference between credible and fanciful descriptions or explanations of anything in the world. I have written on that long ago—starting at the Secular Web a project I never continued (and likely won’t any time soon; it would be great if some others with credentials continued it), but the first entry I did complete probably comes as close to an answer as we are likely to get: and that you can read as The Origins of Greek Philosophy.

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